Booting

In the previous sections you completed building and installing Ubuntu Touch on your device. The next step is to boot the device, gain remote access and debug as necessary.

What is a successful boot?

When you boot your build for the first time you will normally not get anything on the screen. This is not necessarily an indication of something gone wrong. Your system may well have booted successfully and this can be ascertained by gaining remote access.

If your system booted successfully, you will be able to connect to your device from your host using ssh and continue debugging and configuring from there.

If something went wrong, you should normally be offered a telnet connection through which you can proceed with debugging. If you don’t get either of these, the problem might be more difficult to determine. If you get stuck don’t hesitate to seek help.

Gaining remote access

When your device boots it will likely stay at the bootloader screen. However, you should also get a new network connection on the computer you have it plugged in to. To determine if this is the case, and what type of connection you have been offered, proceed as described below.

ssh connection

To confirm that your device has booted correctly, on your host computer, run dmesg -w and watch for “GNU/Linux device” in the output. This confirms that you can establish an ssh connection to the device (see below). If you instead get something similar to “Halium initrd Failed to boot”, skip to telnet connection.

Establish an ssh connection to your device as follows:

Your computer should now have a newly connected RNDIS interface. Check the output of ip link show for the device name. The device name will most likely resemble enp0s29u1u1. Assign this device a fake MAC address (if the default one is all 00s) and an IP of 10.15.19.100:

ip link set <devicename> address 02:11:22:33:44:55
ip address add 10.15.19.100/24 dev <devicename>
ip link set <devicename> up

Once finished, you should be able to login with the following:

ssh phablet@10.15.19.82

The password will be the one you set when you ran the halium-install script.

telnet connection

If you have been offered a telnet connection the rootfs and system image have likely not been found and mounted at boot time. This may indicate that one or more partitions have not been mounted as they should. Connect to your device with the following command:

telnet 192.168.2.15

From here you can start debugging to find out what went wrong. Please seek help to find out how to proceed.